One Thousand Monkeys, One Thousand Typewriters is the largest online source of free role playing and story games. With so many choices, you may want to look at the winners of the 2006 Game Chef contest, with its interesting rules: Crime and Punishment, the RPG about being a writer for a crime procedural TV show; Liquid Crystal, about a robot with no memory; Time Traitor with its mysterious Factors; and the haunted house story Merryweather.
posted on Feb 15, 2008 - View this thread

Rails of War is a terrific flash game, where you equip a train with ever-increasing combinations of weapons and guide it through various missions. It is a representative of the growing number of Defense-style flash strategy games started by Tower Defense and friends, which we discussed before. Now you can try Age of War, where you try to destroy an opponents base through five distinct eras; Invasion Tactical Defense where you must manage a nuclear missile plant and its anti-aircraft defenses; the inevitable and previously mentioned zombie defense games; StarCraft FA5, where you are the Zerg defending your base; and the lovely and abstract Red. These is a particularly addictive class of games, so be warned...
posted on Nov 29, 2007 - View this thread

The Library Arcade features one surprisingly entertaining flash game about pleasing library patrons, and one less entertaining, but probably more directly applicable, game about shelving. You can also try to discover the cause of a mysterious disease using your research skills in an arcade-like game [username: Tammy, password: Allgood]. More on the discussion of the role of games in libraries.
posted on Oct 12, 2007 - View this thread

Several recent classics of PC gaming have been released for free. The first few are ad supported, including first person shooters Far Cry (89% rating) and Ghost Recon (82% rating), the action-adventure game Prince of Persia Sands of Time (89% rating) and the minigame extravaganza Rayman Raving Rabbids (55% rating). To go a bit further back, EA has also released its 12-year-old classic Command and Conquer Gold for free. And more very recent top-flight games look like they will be appearing for free in the near future. [Ad-supported games are for the US only, and the ads aren't that bad - they appear during loading and on menus, not in the game]
posted on Sep 4, 2007 - View this thread

The top 100 Indy games of the last three years as selected by GameTunnel, which offers in-depth reviews of independent games (also useful are their best of 2006 and best of 2005). On the other side of the indy gaming world, ModDB does the same thing for the best mods of 2006 chosen by their editors and players, along with a full database of other mods. [You may also want to see my previous post on free games.]
posted on Aug 19, 2007 - View this thread

For nearly two decades, fifty computers have been running day and night on an extremely complex problem. Today, scientists from the University of Alberta announced the result of all that work - they have solved the game of checkers. Chinook, the computer program they developed, can never be beaten - try for yourself. While checkers is the most complicated game to be solved so far, it is not the only one. You can play a perfect game of tic-tac-toe, of course, but also connect four, and a 6x6 board of the game othello. Chess players are already thinking ahead to when their game is solved, with Advanced Chess being Gary Kasparov's answer. The hardest game to completely solve might be Go, which may not be solved until 2100.
posted on Jul 19, 2007 - View this thread

Fun with Wikipedia. Try Catfishing, where you guess the article based on the often idiosyncratic Wikipedia categories to which it has been assigned. The related Wiki'd Game involves guessing a topic based on the first seven Wikipedia internal links to it. Or find the shortest path between two concepts (try using the fascinating Omipelagos, which does so automatically) or race to get from one topic to another. Most recently, Something Awful developed the concept of Wikigroaning. [A few challenges inside]
posted on Jun 5, 2007 - View this thread

You Don't Know Jack playable online. "If 50 Cent was actually worth 50 cents when he was born in 1975, adjusting for inflation, what would his name be today?" Plus, see the topical daily DisOrDat, including: Is this quote from the Bible or Deathstalker III? Crayola color or award-nominated porn movie? Brand of computer software or member of the Justice League? (NSFW for insulting commentator and suggestive references)
posted on Mar 7, 2007 - View this thread

101 free games for Windows. Computer Gaming World (now called Games For Windows) lists some excellent downloads. Some standouts: Penumbra, a physics-based horror adventure; now-free classics like Star Control 2, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and Maniac Mansion; remakes of other classics like the Star Wars arcade game; addictive action title Every Extend; Asteroids-meets-RTS Base Invaders, and many, many more. Are they missing anything (besides TrackMania, ADOM, and Cave Story)?
posted on Jan 21, 2007 - View this thread

Combining incredible hubris with deep incompetence, Active Enterprises was probably the worst game company of all time. They released precisely two games in the early 1990s. The first was the insanely horrible Action 52, (retail price: $200), which was designed to take advantage of a "silent wave of anti, far-eastern [sic] made products," and featured an unwinnable contest. More amazing, however, was the sequel to the 52nd game in their Action 52 cartridge, Cheetahmen II. Never quite the breakout hit that Active intended, perhaps because it was crippled with bizarre bugs and middle school art, the world never got to see the second issue of the Cheetahmen comic book, nor the planned set of action figures, nor their Action Gamemaster console.
posted on Jan 19, 2007 - View this thread

Chess has a long, if somewhat shrouded, history, with beautiful chess pieces found dating from the 5th century. It has spawned hundreds of fascinating stories, and many interesting names for moves. For the last five decades, the history of chess and computers have been intertwined in many ways. Chess continues to adapt to a new age, with controversies around computer-assisted cheating, attempts to sex-up chess books, thousands of variants, and an amazing online database that can search through recorded games for the last 200 years.
posted on Dec 4, 2006 - View this thread

1,100 Apple II games you can play online. If you are too overwhelmed by your memories to know what to play, some playable classics: Oregon Trail*, Ultima IV*, Archon*, Captain Goodnight and the Islands of Fear*, Drol*, Wings of Fury*, Choplifter *, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?* and Taipan*. Or you can play the first game mod in history: Castle Smurfenstein, a modification of the 1983 original Castle Wolfenstein. What did I miss? [Young whippersnappers can click the asterisks to find out why the game was important. Use the left and right alt keys for joystick buttons, the other instructions are on the site. Emulator only works with IE, sorry. See also this.]
posted on Aug 29, 2006 - View this thread

While groups like the Serious Games Initiative are working on making games effective teaching tools, and Social Impact Games are categorizing hundreds of socially useful games, there are some simulations and "serious games" available now which can also be a lot of fun (at least for a little while). Online, you can try your hand at the basics of sailing, setting wildfires, learning photography, or experience a heavy-handed simulation of the war on terror. Less seriously, there is the stapler simulator and the zombie attack simulator. For a bit more involved experience, download a college administration simulator, the UN's Food Force, and, soon, a simulation on the Rwandan genocide. Is learning this way actually useful, or do we have further to go, first? [Flash, Shockwave, and Java used in some links. Some prev. here and here]
posted on Nov 15, 2005 - View this thread

The Most Ambitious Game Ever? At this year's Game Developers Conference, Sims creator Will Wright's upcoming game Spore drew standing ovations. Not to be outdone, Peter Molyneux (of Populous and Black & White fame) revealed his own ambitious game-like project The Room. While the top game designers have freedom to play, independents rail (read Greg Costikyan's amazing bit in the middle) at the restrictions of the publisher system. For those who doubt games can be art.
posted on Mar 15, 2005 - View this thread